Science

Bleached coral fragments recovered after touching healthy genetic clones in laboratory experiments involving one species and two genotypes. A week of contact supplied enough beneficial algae for fragments to continue recovering after separation. Tissue fusion appears to enable rapid transfer, but mismatched corals competed instead, and reef-scale restoration remains untested. A few millimeters separated recovery from severe decline in tanks of bleached coral. Fragments touching healthy genetic clones regained their beneficial algae and resumed growth. Fragments held nearby without contact largely succumbed to invasive algae and tissue loss. The laboratory findings, published in Science Advances, reveal a route to rapid recovery after bleaching. Stanford University researchers found that about a week of contact could provide enough algae for recovery to continue independently. The results identify a biological mechanism, rather than a method already demonstrated to restore natural reefs. Danny Collins, an oceans doctoral student at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, led the study with colleagues including Steve Palumbi.

The remains of two Ramesses II statues — one of which would have originally stood around 28 feet tall — were found by a villager in Egypt.

D. rex's fruiting bodies were discovered in the forests of Yunnan Province. (Song et al., Frontiers in Fungal Biology, 2026) Yunnan Province in China is famous for its mushrooms and fungi, but somehow, scientists have only just come across a new species that has rightly earned the name 'king'. Named Dianjunus rex (or D. rex for short), its gigantic, club-like fruiting bodies can grow up to 50 centimeters tall, which is about one and a half feet, or the height of a traffic cone. A researcher holds up two D. rex fruiting bodies to show off their impressive size. (Provided by Indunil Senanayake) But its impressive size is not the only exciting thing about this fungus. Its genes also contain clues about a major moment in the history of life on Earth. Mycologist Indunil Senanayake of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and her colleagues describe the new species in a paper published in Frontiers in Fungal Biology. D. rex is the only known member of its family, Dianjunaceae. "This remarkable species… provides a rare window into the evolution of extreme fungal body forms," says Senanayake.

"The traces of sodium in the atmosphere of this white dwarf absorb the orange part of the spectrum, leaving behind a ghostly green glow."

NASA is playing an important role in JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission, to advance our understanding of Mars’ moons and build on the agency’s long history of exploring the Red Planet. The mission aims to characterize and determine the origin of Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos and deliver a sample of Phobos to Earth. The MMX spacecraft is targeting launch from JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 3:41 p.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 19 (4:41 a.m. JST on Tuesday, Oct. 20).

Seen from Earth, the Moon looks so bright and peaceful. But on closer inspection, the lunar surface is etched with crinkles that also happen to be active faults—whose appearance and behavior may be more unexpected than scientists thought. In a study published yesterday in The Planetary Science Journal, scientists report the identification of more than 10,000 young faults across the lunar surface. The team referenced images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), specifically its images of ridges and long, curvy structures called lobate scarps. These features form as a result of a celestial body’s contraction, in this case the Moon. From the analysis, the researchers concluded that the moon’s radius has shrunk by roughly 148 feet (45 meters) in the past 400 million years. Global map of the moon centered on the nearside. The red lines show the locations of over 8,900 lobate scarps, and the blue lines show the locations of over 2,000 small mare ridges. Credit: NASA/ASU/Intuitive Machines/SmithsonianThis kind of change isn’t unique to the Moon; similar shrinkage is also happening to Mercury.

The UMC is an annual conference with representatives from over 25 countries. Since 1970, it has brought together a community of academic, government and commercial sector professionals. Two Eckerd students are joining Associate Professor of Marine Science Patrick Schwing ’06, Ph. D., at the conference this fall. “These are all the opportunities, if you were at an R1 institution, all of the grad students would be doing,” says Schwing. Over the past five to ten years, demand for lithium-ion and other battery components has risen. Nodules, a type of mineral that takes millions of years to grow on the seafloor, absorb basic metals needed to make batteries, Schwing says. Nodules are one of the mineral types being targeted for ocean mining. The impacts of deep-sea mining remain unknown, from climate to regulatory risks. Schwing and his student researchers are working to establish baselines.

Nanotyrannus measured nearly 20 feet long and weighed about 1,500 pounds Almost one year ago, paleontologists finally settled a longstanding debate about Tyrannosaurus rex, arguably Earth’s most famous dinosaur. After reviewing decades of mounting evidence, researchers documented around 150 morphological differences across multiple supposed juvenile T. rex skeletons. Instead of young dinosaurs, these were actually adult examples of an entirely separate species now known as Nanotyrannus lancensis.

Astronaut Christina Koch, 47, is the first woman to travel to the Moon. She is also one of the four people who have ventured the farthest into space, serving as a specialist on the Artemis 2 mission. An engineer and physicist, Koch is the first civilian scientist astronaut — with no ties to her country’s military — to achieve all those milestones; she also holds the record for the longest continuous time spent in space by a woman and took part in the first all-female spacewalk. In this video interview with EL PAÍS, Koch revisits some of the most intense moments of her historic mission to the Moon last April and reflects on what lies ahead in the race to the Moon and Mars. The astronaut also discusses her future: she believes her time in space is behind her and that she is ready to pass the torch to a new generation of astronauts who will be called on to colonize our satellite and prepare for the first missions to the red planet. Koch says humanity is fully prepared for that goal, both physically and mentally. The scientist and astronaut is due to visit Spain later this month to receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord alongside the rest of the Artemis 2 crew. Question.

Morgridge’s latest Fearless Science Forum, held on Oct. 13, asked four scientific leaders how scientists know what they know. The post Discuss: What is scientific knowledge, anyway? appeared first on Morgridge Institute for Research .

Life, it seems, wants to play. Anyone who’s ever spent ten minutes with a five-year-old knows this perfectly well: very young children are masters at make-believe. And it’s not just people—play comes instinctively across the animal kingdom. Rats are fond of rough-and-tumble play, especially after periods of isolation. Octopuses will toy with Legos in much the same way that a newborn will play with blocks. Far from being a useless pastime, play appears to be a fundamental feedback mechanism between individuals and the external world, a kind of informal investigation into the basic rules governing physical and social environments. As the American Academy of Pediatrics once put it: “Play and learning are inextricably linked.” Machines are different: they’re engineered to follow strict rules, formulas, algorithmic dictates. True, modern AI systems are unlike other kinds of machines in that they’re able to learn over time, at least in a narrow sense of the term. But machine learning is at its core a top-down process: AI models are trained to perform certain goals—“objective functions” in tech industry parlance—graded on their performance, and then they hone their strategy from there.

The Agents tab of an antibody discovery Foundry in Benchling lists five agents: coordinator, design, cloning and sourcing, lab planning and data, and analysis and learning. Each agent runs on a daily schedule or is triggered by an event. A timeline below shows their activity over the past day, including work around midnight. Credit: Image courtesy of Benchling Not long ago, a running joke took hold among software engineers and aspiring “vibe coders.” The bit was to hand an AI model a monumentally complex, multi-month task, building a full Slack clone from scratch, recreating a game like GTA, or even designing and training its own successor on a laptop, and demand it do the whole thing in a single shot. To seal the deal, prompts would end with a three-word incantation: “Make no mistakes.”

Dr. Jasińska studies the neural systems that support language and cognitive development and learning using a combination of behavioral, genetic, and neuroimaging (fNIRS, s/fMRI, EEG/ERP) research methods. Her research aims to understand how early life experiences (including bilingual/multilingual language experience) shape neurocognitive development and learning, with a focus on understanding development in environments with poverty-related risk, including rural communities in West Africa and recently resettled refugee children in Canada. Dr. Jasińska received her Ph. D. in Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of Toronto in 2013, and completed postdoctoral training at Haskins Laboratories before establishing the BOLD laboratory.

Researchers hunted for clues in modal analysis of 20th-century replica bell at Penn State Behrend. The Liberty Bell, with its famous crack, hasn’t been rung in 180 years, but that hasn’t stopped scientists from pondering what the bell might have sounded like when tolling. In honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary, researchers at Penn State University have modeled its acoustic properties, drawing on data collected from one of the bell’s replicas. The work was first presented at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia earlier this year, followed by an article in Physics Today.

My brother, Chris Davies, who has died aged 61 of cancer, was an academic metallurgist whose research helped to bring about a better understanding of why metals behave the way they do – and therefore how to control their properties during manufacturing. Much of his research took place at Monash University in Australia, where he had moved from the UK in the early 1990s. In particular, his work on the behaviour of light metals and alloys fed into the development of lighter, stronger and more reliable materials used in the making of aircraft, vehicles and medical devices. Chris’s studies also helped to support advances in 3D printing by providing insights into how companies can produce high-performance metal components more efficiently, with less waste and lower energy consumption. Born in Cardiff, Chris was the son of Jack and his wife, Margaret (nee Powell), both teachers of English. He attended Cardiff high school and then gained a degree in engineering at Imperial College London, where he stayed on to do a PhD.

The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of a rigorous collaborative process involving journalists, editors, and fact-checkers. Specializing in news analysis via desk research and international wire services, the team focuses on transforming raw information into accessible, verified content. This curation and synthesis process ensures constant monitoring of technological innovations and major scientific breakthroughs. By cross-referencing sources and conducting multiple rounds of peer review, the Futura Team guarantees scientific accuracy and pedagogical clarity. This collective signature serves as a hallmark of trust, providing reactive, cross-disciplinary information at the forefront of current events Forget what you learned in school about evolution being ancient history. Modern science shows it is humming along, especially in some of the world’s harshest environments.

A day on Earth is no longer linked to the rising and setting of the sun after the world's timekeepers voted to get rid of the leap second. Since the 1970s, leap seconds have been added to global clocks 27 times, to keep atomic time in sync with Earth's daily rotation, which has slowed over billions of years. On such occasions clocks would pause for a second at 11:59:59 on New Year's Eve to allow the Earth's rotation to catch up with atomic time – which is set by the steady tick of electrons rather than planetary movement. The last one happened in 2016. But on Thursday afternoon, the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris approved a resolution to allow the difference between civil time (what people set their clocks to) and solar time to increase from one second to one hour. It means that there will be no more adjustments to clocks until the difference between a solar day and a 24-hour Earth atomic day has slipped by 60 minutes – a few thousand years from now.